Something You Should Know - How to Build The Life You Want & Why Eggs Are More Amazing Than You Ever Knew

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

When you are faced with a tough decision, some common advice is to “sleep on it." By sleeping and waking up you may have a new and different perspective that will make your decision easier. Is that true? Is it good advice to sleep on it? This episode begins with a brief discussion. https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/does-sleeping-on-it-really-work Are you a victim of your circumstances or can you build the life you want? According to Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey, your life is yours to create! Arthur is a social scientist, a professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. He has authored several books and his latest he wrote with Oprah titled Build the Life You Want (https://amzn.to/45eihhQ). Listen as he explains how to cultivate happiness, contentment, and fulfillment in your life no matter where you are right now.  Eggs are amazing. For many species, they are the beginning of life. They also make modern cooking possible. They are even essential in making our flu vaccine supply. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Listen to my guest Lizzie Stark who knows more about eggs than anyone and you will have a better appreciation for the incredible, edible egg. Lizzie is author of the book Egg: A Dozen Ovatures (https://amzn.to/46dU7VW). If you have ever been tempted to buy a trampoline, be aware there is more to that decision than you may realize. Listen as I explain some important considerations and why many people believe it is a bad idea. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-insurance-homeowners-trampoline/trampoline-for-the-kids-check-your-insurance-first-idUSBRE8BJ0ZE20121220 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! PrizePicks is a skill-based, real-money Daily Fantasy Sports game. You pick 2-6 players and if they will go more or less than their PrizePicks projection. It's that simple! Go to https://prizepicks.com/sysk and use code sysk for a first deposit match up to $100 With HelloFresh, you get farm-fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Go to https://HelloFresh.com/50something and use code 50something for 50% off plus free shipping! BetterHelp is truly the best way to make your brain your friend. Give it a try. Visit https://BetterHelp.com/Something today to get 10% off your first month! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The search for truth never ends. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story. Connect with friends, explore the roaring 20s, and enjoy thrilling activities and challenges while supporting environmental causes. After seven years, the adventure continues with our immersive travels feature. Explore distant cultures and engage in exciting experiences. There's always something new to discover. Are you ready?

Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, when you have a tough decision, you might be tempted to sleep on it first. Is that good advice? We'll explore that. Then, how to create the life you want. And anyone can do it. Everybody can get happier no matter where they start.

Happiness, I mean ultimate happiness, the complete absence of all negativity is impossible in this life. And the truth is that our goal isn't happiness at all, it's happierness. It's actually getting happier. Also the problem with trampolines and why you might want to think twice before getting one. And eggs. Imagine life without eggs. They do more than you ever knew, including making your flu vaccine.

The U.S. government has men with guns protecting vast stores of chickens that are laying eggs that are used to produce the country's vaccine supply. All this today on Something You Should Know. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking. Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow melissa and doug the play is pretend the skills are real look for melissa and doug

wherever you shop for toys something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. I don't know if you can hear it in my voice, but I caught a cold. It's the first cold I've had since before COVID. That's a pretty good run. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I'm sure you have heard the advice or maybe even given the advice when somebody or you have a big decision to make, you should sleep on it.

Before you make your decision, sleep on it. Well, there is some scientific evidence to support that advice. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst briefly exposed a group of people to the Iowa gambling test, which is a widely accepted game of decision-making. After their brief exposure to the test, half of the subjects took the test immediately, and the other half took it after a good night's sleep.

The group that slept on it did noticeably better. The author of the study explains that sleep fine-tunes memory and sharpens learning. She says that while we sleep, we're actually revisiting a lot of information that we've stored, giving the logical data a better chance to take hold and prevail. And that is something you should know. Is the life you are living the life you want? Or would you like it to be different, to be better? I think as soon as you hear that question, you know the answer.

Most of us have at least some parts of our life that we wish were better. So what if you could build the life you want? Well, that's what Arthur Brooks is here to talk about. Arthur is a social scientist, a professor at Harvard, a professor of management practices at the Harvard Business School, and author of several books. His latest is one he wrote with Oprah Winfrey, and it is called Build the Life You Want, the Art and Science of Getting Happier. Hey, Arthur, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you. Great to be with you.

So start by explaining what you mean, building the life you want, and why did you decide to dive into this? Oprah and I, when we were engaging in this book project, we were talking about what we wanted to write about, and we noticed something about the way that people talk about happiness. For her in mass media, and for me as an academic, you know, I do work on the science of happiness. And I teach thousands of students how to use the science. And one of the things that we noticed is that people, they just hope happiness will happen to them.

They don't actually find themselves as sort of agents in their own happiness. Happiness is a feeling as far as people are concerned. And it's nice when you can get it. And that's a very disempowering way to see happiness. But the good news is it's not even right. Happiness is not a feeling. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is something that's quite distinct. We can study it, we can understand it, and we can actually build the lives that we want that have more of it. And this is a step-by-step guide. This guide is a, this is the how-to manual.

It's the owner's manual for people's own happiness. And so when you say that you can build happiness, because I certainly think you're right, people think happiness happens to them. Happy things, good things happen, and they just happen. But you can't go out and create a whole lot of it yourself, which is what you're saying, is that you can. Absolutely, yeah. A lot of people think that, you know, for example, that they hope that they will feel happier tomorrow. And by that, they're talking about how they're managed by their own emotions. We know that happiness is not a feeling feeling but rather that feelings are evidence of

happiness happiness is actually a combination of three things kind of like your food is a is a combination of three macronutrients you know if you ask me what's Thanksgiving dinner I wouldn't say the smell of the turkey which would be kind of like your feelings I would say it's protein carbohydrates and fat and the truth is that happiness is a combination of three macronutrients as well. Your enjoyment of life, your satisfaction with your life, and your meaning in life. If you want to be a really happy person, you need to have balance and abundance across those three dimensions.

And all three of those have a huge psychological and neuroscientific literature behind them and tons of strategies that we can actually follow so that we can be happier people. When I meet somebody for the first time and they're not very happy and a lot of people aren't very happy, as we all know, I know that I'm going to be able to diagnose the happiness problem with a deficit in one or more of those three macronutrients. It's kind of like looking at their nutritional profile and seeing what's wrong with their diet to figure out why they don't feel well.

And so that's a lot of what I do. Some people, they're not getting enough enjoyment from their life or they don't know what enjoyment really is. And so they're just looking for pleasure, for example. Some people, they don't have long-term goals. They're not willing to defer their gratification to get their goals, so they don't have satisfaction. And many people, they have a real crisis of meaning in their life because they're not looking in the right places for it. So that's what we're talking about. The happiest people that I've ever met have balance across those three dimensions. They're thinking about the things in their life that are going to bring those three dimensions, and they're very healthy in those ways as well. And I imagine that people will sometimes say to you something along the lines of, well, you don't know about my life,

because my life is just hell, or whatever it is they say, that, you know, you're painting this kind of panacea of a happy life, but life has a way of dealing some bad hands along the way. Yeah, that's right. And one of the biggest mistakes that people make in their journey of trying to get happier is that they think that they can't until they get rid of their sources of unhappiness. That's a huge mistake. The truth is that life has always both happy and unhappy experiences and both positive and negative emotions. The truth is that life has always both happy and unhappy experiences and both positive and negative emotions. The idea that you would want to get rid of your negative emotions is pure insanity. You're alive today because your negative emotions, because of your fear and anger and

disgust and your sadness, these are evolved to protect you from threats. You know, the truth is that when people say to me, I want to be happy, but, and then they tell me something that's wrong in their lives, they're really missing the truth about happiness, which is that everybody can get happier no matter where they start. Happiness, which would be the, I mean, ultimate happiness, the complete absence of all negativity is impossible in this life. It really is. And the truth is that our goal isn't happiness at all. It's happierness. It's actually getting happier by practicing the really the best ideas that are in the literature, in the science, in each of our lives without

worrying about whether or not we have sources of unhappiness in our lives, because inevitably, we will. And so therefore, I would imagine that happiness comes and goes in waves, that you're not always this, it's not a constant. Yeah, my goodness, that would, and when you think about it, who could stand that? The idea of your happiest moment and living in the absolute bliss of your happiest moment, just a moment's reflection on that makes you think you wouldn't want to. I mean, when I talk to young couples and they say, what happens when the passion wears off? And I say, well, then you'll be able to get on with your life and you won't be completely unproductive and semi-insane. Your brain will stop looking like the brain of a methamphetamine addict.

The truth of the matter is that we have to have a full life to have a good life. And that means experiencing lots of things, good and bad, so that we can learn and grow, so that we can understand other people. And quite frankly, the unhappy experiences that we have, they're super important to find happiness. Nobody finds the meaning in their life at that week in the beach. They find the meaning in their life when they realize that they're resilient after something happens that's aversive to them, when they're afraid or somebody dies that they love or their business might go under and they still make it past and they find the sense of meaning in their life. Or people get satisfaction when they defer their gratification, when they work hard and suffer for something. And so, you know, endless happiness, endless bliss, endless good feelings is not what we want at all. But I would imagine that if people who are unhappy

knew what to do to be happy, they would do it. Otherwise, why would they stay unhappy? So what are the kinds of things, just some examples of things you when people come to you and say well I'd yeah I'd like to be happier well then do this like do what well to begin with it's very important that you understand the nature of your emotions most people when they think about happiness and unhappiness they're thinking about positive and negative feelings and and we naturally have both of course because this is part of being human and making our way in the world. The outside stimuli outside of us, they send a signal to something called the limbic system of the brain. The limbic system of the brain was evolved over a 40 million year period.

And it really has one job, which is to create emotions. Emotions are a universal language that translate what you see and what you smell and what you perceive into signals so that you can decide how to react if you so choose. So something crosses your visual cortex. Maybe a car is rushing toward you when you're crossing the street and you think you might get run over. Your brain literally processes that as a large predator after you. It sends a signal down your ocular nerve. It lights up the amygdala of your limbic system, which is where fear and anger, they tend to originate. That sends signals through various parts of your brain and you start to spit out stress hormones. That happens in about 74 milliseconds, way before you're conscious of anything. Three or four seconds later,

you've jumped out of the way already. Your heart is pounding. Maybe you've made an obscene gesture to the driver. And then about three or four seconds later, you're consciously saying, well, I shouldn't have made that gesture with my finger because that's not what a good person does. You see that your conscious mind is behind your limbic system. Now, understanding that is critically important because if you're just living in your limbic system, you'll be living and reacting to your emotions. If you allow the experience of what's going on in your life time enough to get to your prefrontal cortex, you know, the modern part of your brain right behind your forehead, then you can actually decide how you're going to react. And so what we talk about a lot is the techniques for learning how to react, where you can substitute emotions for the ones that you feel, where you can choose reactions that are the most

positive ones available, where you can disregard your emotions if you actually think they're extraneous to your experience, but you have to bring your whole brain to the game is the point. And that's where the beginning of engineering your own happiness begins. Don't you think that whether you're happy, whether you're enjoying your life, temperament has something to do with it. There just seem to be people who go through life and they seem pretty happy. And there are people who just seem pretty grumpy. And it seems like it's kind of wired in. Yeah, well, there is a lot of that. And one of the reasons is because we find that our

baseline temperament is about 50% genetic. So if you have really gloomy parents or suffer from a lot of negative emotions or a lot of intense negative emotions, well, that might be part of your genetic profile. That's about 50% of the intensity and positive and negative side of emotions that people feel. Now, the other 50% is really under your management. So about a quarter of it is circumstantial, which doesn't matter that much because it doesn't last. But another quarter of it is entirely based on habits. Now, you might say, okay, 50%, that's a lot. Well, that's actually not a lot. I can actually show you data that 50% of your tendency to

abuse drugs and alcohol is also genetic. But if you know that, then you can tailor your habits and you can actually manage your genetics, but you have to have the knowledge and the will to change something and know that it's there. So it's important to keep this in mind. Now, one of the ways that you can learn about your temperament is a test that we write about a lot called the PANAS test, the positive affect negative affect series, which is a series of questions that measures your intensity of your positive emotions and the intensity of your negative emotions. Now, everybody has the same emotions, but not everybody has the same intensity of their emotions. That's what comes from your genetics and circumstances. So we measure that.

And what you find is that about a quarter of the population is in each of one of each of four basic temperaments. And before you explain those four things, let me remind people that I'm speaking with Arthur Brooks. He is a social scientist and professor at Harvard. And he, along with Oprah Winfrey, are authors of the book, Build the Life You Want. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather.

Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. So Arthur, you were going to explain the four major temperaments, so go ahead. The first is called the mad scientist. These are people who have very intense positive emotions and very intense negative emotions. Now keep in mind that positive and negative emotions are not opposite from each other. They can coexist because they're largely produced in different parts of the brain. Being happier is not being less unhappy.

On the contrary, you can be unusually happy and an unusually unhappy person. That's the mad scientist. And that's a quarter of the population. And by the way, that's me. I'm a mad scientist. And that's a quarter of the population. And by the way, that's me. I'm a mad scientist. I have very, very strong feelings and sentiments, kind of up and down and up and down. Now, there's some people, the lucky quarter of the population, that are very strong positive and very weak negative. These are the cheerleaders. There's some that have very strong negative and very weak positive emotions. And these are called the poets. They have a tendency to kind of see a lot of threats on the horizon.

They might be a little bit on the negative side and that's the least fun, but it's also often the most creative for a bunch of reasons. And finally, they're the people who have low intensity of positive and low intensity of negative. These are people that are called the judges. These are people that are simply low affect people people they don't have intense emotions that they display now one of the things that's worth pointing out is that it's what you have

to it's worth thinking about your own emotions to know what quartile you fit into and this test is incredibly helpful this pan is test for figuring out who you are so you'll understand how you're wired. You'll say to yourself, there's nothing wrong with me. I'm just a poet. You'll know how to, you'll have a better understanding of how to manage yourself. You'll have a better understanding of the relationships that you should cultivate that can compliment you. I even recommend that people think about the people they date based on these profiles. Sometimes when you have two people of the same profile, it's really bad. If you have two cheerleaders that see only positive

and never think about the negative consequences of anything, they're going to spend all the money and go bankrupt, is one of the things you tend to find. Two poets, maybe too depressing. But the complementarity and understanding yourself and managing yourself, that helps us understand why some people have stronger emotions than others. And which am I and what are my unique talents and what can I do to get happier? So maybe this is part of the same thing that you just said about negative and positive emotions.

But what about just, you know, a person's outlook on life? You know, there are people where, you know, everything's a problem, and they always see the negative, that those people seem, well, it actually seems like those are the people that would never read your book anyway, because life sucks, and, you know, what's the point, you know? But it does seem like your outlook has something to do with how happy or unhappy you will be, because it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It can be, and

indeed, these tend to be the poets. You know, the people who say, it's not going to work out, it's probably going to be really crummy. And the reason is because poets, the people who have high negative emotional tendencies and low positive emotional traits, at least in intensity, they tend to, you know, see around the corner and see a monster coming. And by the way, a lot of times they're right.

That's the reason that when I talk to a CEO who's a cheerleader, I say, you better have somebody close to you who's a poet who can actually be your threat spotter. Otherwise, bad things are going to happen and you're going to be surprised. The process of becoming happier if you're not there now and going through what you're talking about, how effortful is it? How long does it take? I mean, what am I in for? A lifetime of getting happier. That's the good news. Now, these are habits, not hacks. One of the problems with our internet culture about getting rich or getting happy or seeing your abs or whatever you're into on the internet is that you want it right now and somebody's going

to sell you a solution to your problem right now. That's almost always a lie. It's internet snake oil. That's also really bad news because when something changes immediately, it almost never lasts in life. That's a truism in life. The truth is that with happiness, you need to do three things. If you want to have a constant process, not of happiness, but happierness. You want to be on the road. You want it to be a direction. You want it to be progressive and get better over the course of your life.

You need to learn what's going on about yourself, which is endlessly fascinating. You need to change your habits and commit yourself to changing your life bit by bit. And then you need to share it with others. So you remember what you're actually learning. And if you do this, this is the guarantee. Next year will be better in many ways than this year. And 10 years from now, you'll be a happier person. And I know this is true because I've seen the data. I'm a

social scientist and I've been looking at the data for 30 years, but more importantly, I did it. You know, when I started off on this journey, I said to myself, I want to be happier. I don't want these things just to be theories. So I started implementing these ideas in my own life. And in the last five years, since I've been working full time on this very subject, my happiness has risen by 60%. Now I know how to measure happiness because I give surveys to my students and I take it myself. A 60% increase. Wow. I have a long way to go, but I can't believe how much better it is because this actually works. But how well does it work if, how can you make yourself happier if you live in a house of miserable people? I mean, it seems like this is very contagious.

Emotional contagion is no joke. Now, sometimes, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a very famous study in Massachusetts where I live called the Framingham Heart Study that was supposed to look over several generations at people living in the community of Framingham, Massachusetts, to see whether or not heart ailments were passed on from generation to generation and whether or not maybe there was even some social contagion for these things. Well, they quickly figured out they didn't just have to ask about heart ailments. They could ask about all sorts of things. And they found, for example, that obesity is socially contagious, that if you have friends who are obese, you're way more likely to become obese, things like that. But the most interesting thing from my point of view is that if you have a close friend who

gets happier, you're most likely to get happier too. Just living within physical proximity of happier people, you'll start to get happier. One of the best ways that you can actually spread happiness is by working on your own happiness because it's contagious. Unfortunately, negativity is contagious as well. So not just negative emotions, but a negative outlook on life. This is one of the reasons that when I actually work with families on that on the happiness of a family unit this is one of the worst things that i see is this contagion of negativity that's manifest inside families where you know they're close to each other they all sort of agree that everything is a bummer and everything sucks and nothing is

good enough and you know that that will spread around like wildfire. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know those people. Yeah. Some of them. Everybody does. Do you have a general sense, like, are we getting happier, less happier? Is the world a happy place or not? The world is going in the wrong direction. I'm very sorry to say. I've been looking at these data for a long time. Now, there's a lot of data on world happiness, and most of it is kind of useless. You know, all those studies that say, which is the happiest country? Now, let's find Denmark. Denmark is a perfectly happy place, but you can't compare countries.

People answer those questions in different ways, in different places, at different times. But you can ask whether or not the same people are getting happier over the course of their lives and whether people similarly situated in a particular community are getting happier. And therefore, you can say whether or not communities and even states and countries are getting happier over time. And those data are not very encouraging. There are some places that are getting happier. There are certain places in Africa that are getting happier as they are pulled out of relative poverty. And it's a wonderful thing to see.

But most of the world, especially the industrialized world, is going in the wrong direction. We found, for example, that starting in the late 1980s, early 90s, the United States started to drift downward in average happiness. It took a huge dogleg down when social media was introduced, especially among young people. And then COVID-19 really, really threw us for a loop that we haven't pulled out of yet. Ordinarily, about 30% of Americans say that they're very happy about their lives, and 15% say they're not happy. That's reversed since COVID. About 30% say they're not happy, and 15% say they're very happy. That's reversed since COVID. About 30% say they're not happy and 15% say they're very happy, according to most good surveys. And that's really an alarming situation.

But it's worth pointing out that when people are suffering in this way, they're going to be paying a lot more attention to what they can do. And this gives all of us this opportunity to be in the happiness movement, to be in the love rebellion, to take ideas like this from the science and common sense and share them with other people. And that's what I want to do. I want to be part of this opportunity to lift people up. Well, it's a great message. Well, I accept that part about how we're going the wrong way. But I appreciate your enthusiasm.

And I think it's contagious that, you contagious that we can build the life we want, we can be happier, just got to make the effort. I've been talking with Arthur Brooks. He is a social scientist, professor at Harvard, and he, along with Oprah Winfrey, are authors of the book Build the Life You Want. And if you'd like to get a copy of that book, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Arthur. Thanks for being here.

Appreciate you coming on. I'm a fan. So thanks for letting me be a guest too. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind.

Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years.

She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It would be impossible to imagine life without eggs. In many cases, life itself would be impossible without eggs. We humans and chickens and a lot of other species start off as an egg. We see eggs in art. We eat eggs. Other creatures eat eggs. Eggs are everywhere. So what is an egg? And why are they everywhere?

That's what Lizzie Stark set out to discover for her book, Egg, A Dozen Overtures. And I think you will be fascinated to learn what she found about eggs. Hi, Lizzie. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks so much for having me. So when most people think of eggs, or when you just say the word egg, I think people think of the chicken egg. And anyone who cooks would tell you that, you know, it's hard to imagine cooking modern food today without eggs. With an egg, you can make everything from a light,

foamy souffle to a dense flan. You use egg whites to clarify stock. You use them as a binder in batters for cookies. They soften up cakes and breads. There's just a huge variety of things you can do with them. And they're also very pregnant symbolically. And you can look to cultures all over the world and springtime traditions that include eggs. As you mentioned, you know, you can make anything with an egg. When did that start? I mean, do we have any sense, like somebody once said, hey, you know, what if we cook this thing? Or it's so long ago and the records are so muddled that we would never know that? Well, eating eggs predates human time by a fair clip. If you look at food history timelines, there's no start date for eating eggs because we've

just always eaten eggs. And in fact, a lot of other species eat eggs because nearly 100% of eggs on this earth, animal eggs, are edible and not poisonous, which is not true of most other food sources. And so people have been hungry all over the world, and they've eaten an astonishing array of eggs and still do. Do they all taste the same? There are differences of opinion about that. I have tried goose eggs, duck eggs, quail eggs, pullet eggs, and I mean regular chicken eggs of course, and I thought they all tasted pretty similar. I was not able to try an ostrich egg though and I hear

those have a little bit of a funky barnyard note. Yeah. I was actually thinking the other day, you know, eggs don't really taste like much. I get that they do a lot in cooking, but when you have a scrambled egg, it's not like, oh my God, this is so tasty. It's not really, doesn't really taste like a lot. Yeah. they don't have a ton of flavor on their own. Although I think like a perfectly scrambled egg in butter is really divine. And certainly overcooked eggs smell appalling. They smell kind of sulfurous because there are different molecules in the white and yolk. And when they get together, they make a very fragrant sulfur molecule.

But they are also excellent vehicles for other flavors. I would say because they are a canvas, you can paint that canvas with a myriad of different colors. And that is one of the reasons they're exciting. And that's also one of the reasons people don't really think about them. You don't think about the canvas on a painting that much. How did eggs get hooked into Easter? Well, the main answer is that eggs were once a seasonal food. So birds lay eggs in response to light. And so when the light cycle changes in the spring, birds are cued to lay more eggs. And so you have a lot more

eggs in the spring than you do in other seasons of the year. So springtime meant egg fest. So that's one reason. Another reason is that eggs are miraculous. They look kind of like little stones, but eventually life bursts forth from them. And the tradition of decorating Easter eggs is certainly older than Easter itself. And there are a lot of wonderful, weird, old folk customs involving eggs, whether it's rolling eggs down a hill, throwing eggs and catching them, then Christianity came in. And rather than give up the egg tradition, they rolled the egg tradition into the practice of Easter. And as for the Easter bunny, the speculation is that bunnies will eat an egg if they can get an egg. Bunnies are hungry, just like all animals.

And in the springtime, there are some birds that are ground nesting or maybe an egg falls out of a nest and the bunnies would eat it. And the theory is that people were seeing bunnies with eggs around them. And then that morphed into the Easter bunny. Something I never knew till I saw your book is that eggs have a lot to do with our vaccines, the vaccines that we use. Well, we owe the modern vaccine, the modern flu vaccine to the egg. Studying viruses used to have a key difficulty. And the key difficulty is that viruses aren't like bacteria. You can't culture them in a Petri dish. You need living tissue to keep a virus alive. And after the Spanish influenza, the flu pandemic of 1918, there were a lot of researchers who wanted to get into virology. And one of them, the famous Ernest Goodpasture,

hired this brilliant assistant, Alice Woodruff, to get to the bottom of things. He was investigating fowlpox. The reason he was investigating fowlpox is that other diseases could be cultured and made into vaccines that could help prevent diseases in humans. So previous scientists had used cowpox to eliminate smallpox in humans by using it as a vaccine. And so Dr. Goodpasture was investigating fowlpox and he asked Alice Woodruff to make a bunch of fowlpox virus in something that wasn't a live chicken. And she figured out that she could cut a little window out of an egg shell and pass a needle with fowlpox in it into the developing chicken embryo and give the chicken embryo fowlpox. And then the virus could be purified from the egg afterward. And in fact, it is still the way that most of the world flu vaccine supply is produced today. The U.S. government has men with guns protecting vast stores of chickens that are laying eggs that are used to produce the country's vaccine supply.

Yeah. And they're in undisclosed locations. Because the fear is that someone could attack and kill all these chickens and that would screw up our vaccine supply. Yeah, exactly. I mean, could you imagine what would happen if there were no flu vaccines this year? That wouldn't be good. Wouldn't be good. could you imagine what would happen if there were no flu vaccines this year? That wouldn't be good. Wouldn't be good. And, you know, it takes about, I think, eight to nine months for a chicken to become mature enough to start laying eggs. So replacing the supply of chickens takes a hot

minute. So the idea of the egg as art, you know, I think of like the Fabergé egg is such a, like, I don't even know what they, I know what they are, but I don't know why they're so valuable. But eggs have been in art, and I guess I don't understand why, other than, as you've talked about, it's, you know, the egg is the beginning of everything. There's, it represents things, but why? Well, they're there because they're a potent symbol. That's one way that they're in art, but they're also in art quite literally. So old forms of paint involve, tempera paint is an egg yolk with some pigment added to it. And that was one of the main paints in medieval times and the early Renaissance. And there are frescoes with egg paint dating back much, much further back to ancient Egyptian times. So there is a use for eggs in art. Early photographic prints were glossed with frothed egg white. Later, artists moved to gelatin. And crushed eggshells can be used as paint extenders. And egg whites have been used in a variety of lacquers and varnishes. They make art robust and tough and stand the test of time. In the same way, you could think about how hard it is to clean a dish that somebody has eaten a fried egg on because the proteins are really

sticky and tough. Salvador Dali was quite obsessed with eggs. He painted melty fried eggs, and he has egg imagery and quite a lot of his art. And in 1930, he wrote down some plans to create a 10 foot tall, boiled egg made out of eggs that needed to have a crisp shell that could be cracked in front of gallery audience, and then three-foot-long spoons that could reach into the center of the yolk to prove to any dubious spectators that the giant egg really was, in fact, made of eggs. What was the Egg War of 1848?

In San Francisco, 1848, Gold Francisco, gold rush era San Francisco had a problem. And the problem was that it was short on food. The 49ers had scaled up the city population so quickly that city infrastructure couldn't keep up. And this included the ways of growing food. And so eggs were incredibly expensive. In 1848 dollars, in the city of San Francisco, a single chicken egg would go for like a dollar. And if you were out in the gold fields, it would go for three dollars.

These miners, they were hungry. They were away from home. They wanted their comfort food, their comfort brunch food. And it was shockingly expensive. And there was this enterprising guy named Doc Robinson. And he was a local pharmacist. And he had figured out that there were an awful lot of seabirds on the nearby Farallon Islands. The Farallon Islands are about 20, 25 miles off the coast of San Francisco,

and they are home to a huge variety of seabird life. And Doc Robinson and his brother-in-law, Oren, they got in a boat and they sailed the seas out there. And the important thing to know about the Farallon Islands is that they're incredibly inhospitable to humans. The seas are rough, so rough that previous eras of mariners had called them the devil's teeth because they caused so many shipwrecks. They're home to an incredible population of great white sharks. Usually great white sharks hang out in like pairs, but near the Farallon Islands, they hang out in groups as large as 150. And the islands themselves are just jagged rocks without much brush on them, slippery, wet. And so these two men made it out to the Farallon Islands. They collected a boatload of eggs. They sold their eggs for about $100,000 in today's money. But word got out. Within a week, there were gangs of men going out to the Farallones to gather eggs. And they made quite a lot of money off of gathering the seabird eggs,

particularly those of the Common Muir, which at the time were nesting on the islands in populations probably exceeding 200,000 birds. The work was dirty and hard and dangerous. People with nothing to lose would go out there. They wore these vests that had slits down the front and they would just stuff their vests with as many eggs as they could gather. The day before they gathered, they would go out on to one section of the island and they would smash all of the eggs there. And this was because a truly fresh mirror's egg tastes, you know, tastes perfectly fine in baked goods or, you know, even in an omelet. But an old mirror egg tastes fishy and reputedly, it would take you like more than a month to get the flavor of an

old mirror egg out of your mouth. So it's really important the eggs would be fresh. So after breaking all of the eggs on one section of the island, the next day they would come out, they could be assured that whatever was there was fresh. Frequently, at the end of the day, some men just wouldn't return. The egg company that was the main operator there, threatening, abducting or beating up the light keepers who were on the island. There were gangs that fought each other. And over the years, the mere populations were just decimated. You know, a question I've always had about chickens and eggs, like, I always think that I always worried, like the chicken thinks, well, look, I just laid these eggs and now you're

taking them. These are my babies. Like, do they, do chickens ever like go on strike and say, well, you know, if you're just going to take them, I'm going to not lay them. Well, I haven't heard of chickens going on strike. But I do know that as eggs are laid, the chickens wait to incubate them until a pile of about 10 accumulates. And so if you keep taking the eggs away, they'll keep laying and laying. And when a chicken decides to sit on the eggs, it's said that she has gone broody. And this is something that a lot of people who farm chickens are trying to prevent because they don't want the chicken to sit on the eggs. They want the chicken laying eggs. If you're a chicken laying eggs for a farmer, how long is your career?

So how long a chicken is good for is a matter of judgment and debate. I believe most commercial layers are put out of service around three years old, possibly even younger. But chickens can live up to 15 years old or even a bit older than that. And plenty of people keep them as pets for that long. Usually a hen's peak laying years are the first year or two of productive laying. And so that's the cycle. Can people tell the difference? Could you tell the difference between an egg laid by a chicken early in their career versus one later in their career?

Or eggs are eggs, and when they're done, they're done. Yeah, well, chickens early in their laying career sometimes lay wonky eggs. That's where you get eggs with two yolks or you get an egg that's a little smaller, like a pullet egg with more yolk taking it up, taking up with proportionally more yolk on the interior of it.

And then there's also something called a wind egg, which is an egg that has no yolk at all. And it's called a wind egg because the ancient Greeks believed it was created by the fertile north wind blowing up a chicken's cloaca and getting it pregnant. So, but beyond that, no, I don't think there really is a difference. So if you go into the supermarket, you generally see white eggs and brown eggs. And I think there's a, I guess there's a sense that maybe brown eggs are healthier because they're earth toned. I don't know why. But I've heard that there really, there just isn't much difference. That brown eggs are brown and white eggs are white. And so they're different.

But that's it. Some are white, some are brown. Yeah, and some are green and some are blue. One of the last layers that goes on an egg as it's exiting a chicken is the pigment layer. And all chicken egg colors are due to two chemicals, two pigment colors in various proportions. And when eggs are freshly laid, the pigment can still be a bit wet and it can actually smudge. And one more thing about chickens and egg color,

and that is that chicken earlobe color accurately predicts egg color. Wait, wait, wait. A chicken's earlobe color predicts the egg color? And the reason, one of the reasons brown eggs tend to be cost more than white eggs are not because they're healthier, but because the birds that lay brown eggs require slightly more feed in order to produce an egg. Well, from what you said about men guarding chickens to make vaccines to chicken earlobes predicting egg color, I now know more about eggs than I thought I'd ever know. I've been talking to Lizzie Stark and the name of her book is Egg, A Dozen Overtures. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. I appreciate it. Thanks, Lizzie. Thanks so much, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Pediatricians have been warning parents for decades now about trampolines.

If you are going to throw caution to the wind and get a trampoline, there are a few things you should know. In the U.S. alone, there are over 100,000 trampoline injuries a year. 75% of those injuries occur when there are multiple jumpers on the trampoline. So if your child must bounce, have them bounce one at a time. And skip the flipping. The majority of head, back, and neck injuries are the result of a misstep during a flip, somersault, or fancy trick. And you might want to check your homeowner's insurance policy. Some of them exclude trampolines and injuries from trampolines because they are so dangerous.

And sometimes they have a lot of restrictions that if you don't follow to the letter, they may not cover a claim. And don't be fooled by the safety mats and nets on a trampoline. A report in the journal Pediatrics suggested that the so-called safety equipment just gives jumpers and parents a false sense of security. And that is something you should know. Word-of-mouth marketing is the best way for us to grow our audience. It's people like you who tell people you know, and then they listen, and it seems to work. So please tell someone you know about this podcast.

I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone

is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple,

or wherever you get your podcasts.